Grice, "Xenophanes"

xenophanes: Grice: “You have to be careful when you research for this in Italy – they spell it with an ‘s’!” --  Grecian philosopher, a proponent of an idealized conception of the divine, and the first of the pre-Socratics to propound epistemological views. Born in Colophon, an Ionian Grecian city on the coast of Asia Minor, he emigrated as a young man to the Grecian West Sicily and southern Italy. The formative influence of the Milesians is evident in his rationalism. He is the first of the pre-Socratics for whom we have not only ancient reports but also quite a few verbatim quotations  fragments from his “Lampoons” Silloi and from other didactic poetry. Xenophanes attacks the worldview of Homer, Hesiod, and traditional Grecian piety: it is an outrage that the poets attribute moral failings to the gods. Traditional religion reflects regional biases blond gods for the Northerners; black gods for the Africans. Indeed, anthropomorphic gods reflect the ultimate bias, that of the human viewpoint “If cattle, or horses, or lions . . . could draw pictures of the gods . . . ,” frg. 15. There is a single “greatest” god, who is not at all like a human being, either in body or in mind; he perceives without the aid of organs, he effects changes without “moving,” through the sheer power of his thought. The rainbow is no sign from Zeus; it is simply a special cloud formation. Nor are the sun or the moon gods. All phenomena in the skies, from the elusive “Twin Sons of Zeus” St. Elmo’s fire to sun, moon, and stars, are varieties of cloud formation. There are no mysterious infernal regions; the familiar strata of earth stretch down ad infinitum. The only cosmic limit is the one visible at our feet: the horizontal border between earth and air. Remarkably, Xenophanes tempers his theological and cosmological pronouncements with an epistemological caveat: what he offers is only a “conjecture.” In later antiquity Xenophanes came to be regarded as the founder of the Eleatic School, and his teachings were assimilated to those of Parmenides and Melissus. This appears to be based on nothing more than Xenophanes’ emphasis on the oneness and utter immobility of God. X